Participating stakeholders:
external: Member presses of the Library Publishing Coalition.
internal: Open Book Publishers, punctum books, Jisc, Coventry University.
Date & time:
Thursday, September 29, 2022 @ 8am PDT / 10am CDT / 4pm BST / 5pm CEST (timezone converter), 90-min workshop.
Overview:
COPIM (Community-Led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs) is a 3.5-year project funded by Research England and Arcadia, that will develop and build the critical underlying modular components to support the sustainable publication of open access (OA) books, including infrastructures, business models, governance procedures, re-use strategies, preservation structures, and outreach programs. These systems and infrastructures will be open and collectively managed for the common good. Towards this end, COPIM aims to develop a significantly enriched not-for-profit and open source ecosystem for OA book publishing that will support and sustain a diversity of publishing initiatives and models, particularly in humanities and social sciences publishing.
One of COPIM’s outputs includes the development of Thoth, an open metadata manager, dissemination system and service designed specifically for Open Access books. Its source code is open, its metadata is exposed via open APIs, and all its outputs are released under a CC-0 license allowing for publishers, archivists and distributors to increase their metadata outputs as well as for libraries and platforms to easily gather or transfer book metadata in a variety of metadata formats.
Workshop aims:
With this workshop, Thoth would like to invite members of the Library Publishing Coalition to discuss Thoth’s various services as a metadata manager and dissemination service. With Thoth now being in operational use by a number of scholar-led publishers such as Open Book Publishers, Media Studies Press, and punctum books, the team are looking to expand the range of publishers utilizing Thoth as a metadata manager and dissemination service.
In addition, this workshop aims to present its newly-developed business model that will ensure the continued sustainability which entails maintaining a free version of Thoth and offering a suite of bespoke metadata management services.
Doing so, the team invites feedback on the potential usefulness and usability of Thoth for their publishing programs, and on the business model that seeks to ensure the continued sustainability of the entire project beyond the life of the existing grant.